7 forms measuring 600 x 60 x 60cm, constructed to be held horizontal to a wall
The title 7 forms measuring 600 x 60 x 60cm, constructed to be held horizontal to a wall seems a spare, if adequate, description of the project presented by artist Santiago Sierra at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA). What isn’t captured in the title is the element that moves this work (and I use the term advisedly) from the arid realm of the purely conceptual to another area entirely—one that creates a vivid and stimulating collision of ideas, form, and presence.
For the duration of the project a team of people are paid minimum wages to shoulder the seven monumental six-metre black, beam-like forms. On the day I visit I see two young women quietly whisper to each other around the beam they hold. Others stare straight ahead or listen to iPods. Facing resolutely away from their audience toward a blank wall, some rest their heads against the forms or support them with their hands as they adjust the foam pads that cushion their shoulders. The same foam pads that are used under artworks while they rest on the floor, propped against the wall, just before they are installed.
Work and relationships tend to be two things that cause people the most everyday angst. And, like its two previous iterations in New York and Zurich, 7 forms elegantly reveals a number of often unseen relationships that serve to support the work. Most obviously, the use of paid labour to present the project raises questions around what the artist has termed ‘the remunerated system’. Given that it is the first time the work had been created in Australia, it is tempting to speculate on what it might reveal about Australia’s